It’s the height of summer, and my hands currently smell of basil and garlic. (I’m making pesto with the last of last week’s leaves before improvising some sort of okra-onion curry for dinner.) I’ve got Rameau on the CD player and assorted windows open. Let me tell you about some of them…

Recently published:

Some poems I’ve printed out or e-mailed:

A collection I’m enjoying (and which I’ll be reviewing for Galatea Resurrects): Eating Her Wedding Dress: A Collection of Clothing Poems

A collection I need to return to: the postings at the Blue Print Review blog under the “moment” tag. The entries that held my eye at first glance:
“sky crossing 2,” “sky crossing 1,” “missing words,” “december in just a moment,” “samurai” (this one’s getting rec’d on the fandom blog when I steal some other moment to update it)

Current squee: I’ve managed to draft 22 pieces in 23 days as a participant in 24/7 (actually 23 pieces in as many days, but I didn’t manage to finish anything within day 8), as well as one twelve-line poem outside of the project. That pleases me — and so does one of the pieces being scooped up for publication within hours of my posting it privately to the group. (The editors said they were “smitten” by it! I will thunk back to earth as soon as I turn to the next page of my notebook — ars longa, verse nty-nth — but at the moment, I’m as full of bubbly glee as a flute of sparkling wine.)

(And speaking of returning to earth, I’d best get back to the making of pesto and curry…)

Today Jeannine hosts Christine on the Back to the Future blog tour, with everything from small treasures to photogenic hearts.

See the rest of the week:
26 July: Joanne hosts Wendy
27 July: Jeannine hosts Christine
28 July: Wendy hosts Mary
29 July: Mary hosts Jeannine
30 July: Christine hosts me

(Cross-posted from Pantoums and Persistence.)

The Back to the Future Blog Tour begins tomorrow at Joanne’s place and moves on each day of the week featuring a new poet and a new host.

…but its would-be cartographers are legion, if you ask me.

At any rate, via poems.com, I came across James Longenbach’s Nation review of Lyndall Gordon’s Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and her Family’s Feuds earlier today. I was put off a bit by the royal assumption within its opening (”We don’t reread great novels or poems because we can’t remember the story; we reread because we want to feel our familiar world becoming strange again”), but I like the incarnation of Dickinson that Longenbach says that Gordon presents, in descriptions such as

Emily Dickinson was an extraordinarily powerful woman, an artist who was intimidated by nothing—the opposite of a fear-driven recluse, the opposite of the lovelorn spinster that some of her family members were driven to concoct for the world. … The great virtue of Gordon’s biography is that it makes Dickinson the person—sister, friend, seducer, adversary—seem as scary as her poems.

and

The people to whom Dickinson was most closely related or most passionately attracted were rampant, larger-than-life figures, and as Gordon demonstrates, “Emily was not an oddity amongst them.”

and

A variety of factors may well have determined Dickinson’s decision to seclude herself, but to champion illness as the single most determining factor is to disregard what is otherwise so bracing about Lives Like Loaded Guns: its portrayal of Emily Dickinson as an artist who was, during her lifetime, the victim of nothing.

I don’t know when I’ll get to this book — or whether I’ll agree with either Longenbach or Gordon once I do — but Longenbach’s writeup definitely makes me more inclined to seek it out than before.

“the hem of my dress….” tinywords, 16 June 2010.

“snatched by the wind…” tinywords, 11 June 2010.

“Schrodinger plus Descartes….” microcosms, 16 June 2010

…and I do intend to resume building and revising longer poems later in the summer or fall, but right now other exigencies keep hopping to the front of the queue. It happens:

Gam zeh ya’avor

The only way you’ll find happiness
is to know what you want
when it is already yours

and to know
after it is no longer yours
that it isn’t the only way you’ll find happiness.

~ pld

(originally written for Joanne Merriam’s Ampersand Project, January 2003)

I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF - The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan’s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

Hullo-ullo-ullo!

It’s been (and remains) somewhat messy in the county where I (and Joanne) reside. I’m itchy, itchy, itchy, both literally (water shortage) and figuratively (time shortage vs. things I want to write), but very grateful to have escaped the worst. (The baseball field seven blocks from my house was underwater before the Cumberland had even crested.)

Since I last posted here, some new poems of mine have been published:

“dozing April fool…” at 7×20

“She’s building…”, “Here, I’m able…”, and “That giant glass slipper…”, all at microcosms

“The Wailing Well” (text and audio) at Goblin Fruit

Also, two reviews at Galatea Resurrects, issue 14.

Reading has been even more piecemeal and snatched-moment than usual, so not much to say. At the moment, I’m mulling over today’s feature at Poetry Daily, Aliki Barnstone’s With God in the Morning. Some of the language is too prosaic for my taste (and the ending perhaps too abrupt — something about the “dear God” doesn’t work for me, even though I recognize the clever double meaning in its placement there) — but I’m intrigued by the connections the poem wants to trouble me with.

Oh! I must not neglect to mention, there have been poems written for me as well. Molly Gaudry’s Fingertips riffs on some lines from my Sonic Crochet Hook, and for my birthday, a fellow Taurus sent me a verse portrait of a bull.

And on that note, I’m going to go intimidate another 100 endnotes into submission, and then maybe I can treat myself to revising something or other into a submission.

Christian Wiman’s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.

New short-form poetry market microcosms has just published one of my scifaiku as their first-ever piece on twitter. What an excellent way to kick off NaPoWriMo! I haven’t started writing yet, but anticipate spending a lot of time tonight trying my hand at more haiku, both with traditional subjects and speculative ones.

Mirrored from joannemerriam.com.

If I could get all y’all to buy one poetry book in the near future (say, in celebration of spring, or National Poetry Month), at the moment it would be Alison Luterman’s See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions, 2010). Today I quote to you from “The World Card,” which begins:

I always wanted the World card,
naked androgynous figure striding the globe,
adorned with laurel and lightning bolts…

and builds and builds to

…I wanted to cross the sky and come back
bearing dead stars in my hands, fossil fuel
for poems. I wanted to inhale God’s breath
till it singed my lungs; to be used up by love,
to hang from a tree by my heels.
“Be careful,” the old fortune-teller advised me shrewdly
at the shop where I paid her ten bucks
to turn the deck over in her ringed, swollen fingers.
“It’s not always a good thing, you know –”
but I wouldn’t let her finish. I didn’t want good,
good was too small. I wanted the world.

Speaking of Tarot cards, the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab has a new series to benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund: Fifteen Painted Cards from a Vampire Tarot. I associate BPAL with poetry in part because many of the fragrance names and descriptions borrow from Poe, Swinburne, Keats, and others, and the CBLDF series is associated with Neil Gaiman. I should also note that, over the years, I’ve received some incredible responses to BPAL scents on me, and some fond memories (as well as a few “OMG scrub that off NOW!” moments — no risk, no reward) — a vial of “Embalming Fluid” came to the rescue in a too-small ScotsRail compartment after a too-long day sans showers, and there was an elevator ride where a stranger exclaimed “What IS that?” in a happily gobsmacked way in reaction to the Nanny Ashtoreth.

In other news, my sometime partner in crime Greta Cabrel has a new poem up at Thirteen Myna Birds, I have a booklet of hay(na)ku available via Open Hand Press (all proceeds donated to Haiti relief efforts), and last night I read Wendy Babiak’s The Uninvited Guest, thanks to a rec Joanne made on Twitter. (And speaking of Joanne and Twitter, I really like today’s tanka by Peter Newton on 7×20, the zine she edits, which incidentally is open to submissions…)

The organizers of 2010: A Space Oddity (mentioned formerly) have sent me a tentative list of their events:

• The Art of Book Covers: A/V Pesentation on how illustration and design come together to create a book cover. *Lou Anders, three time Hugo nominated Editorial Director and Chesley Award Winning Art Director of Pyr Books hosts a presentation on how science fiction book covers are created, from commissioning artists, to art direction, to final layout and design. The presentation will feature artwork from some of the most celebrated names in science fiction and fantasy illustration, including some never seen before pieces.
• A Star Ripped Apart by a Black Hole? *While the evidence for high-mass and low-mass black holes is incontrovertible, whether Nature creates black holes of intermediate-mass (1000 - 10,000 times the mass of the Sun) is still quite controversial. We present work indicating that not only do intermediate-mass black holes exist in the centers of dense globular star clusters, but that in one instance the black hole has ripped apart a star that has strayed too close to it. The unusual chemical signature of the debris suggests the star that was ripped apart was a white dwarf, the stellar corpse of a star that no longer burns hydrogen in its core. (Yuanyan Su presenting the current research of astronomy professor Dr. Jimmy Irwin of the University of Alabama.)
• Dark visions and bright: SF poetry reading: *The Science Fiction Poetry Association sponsors a reading of speculative poetry (science fiction, fantasy, horror, and everything in between). Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and Roger Zelazny wrote novels to pay the bills, but they wrote poetry because they needed to. Come find out what depths and heights can be fit into just a few well-chosen words. (David C. Kopaska-Merkel, Peg Duthie and Joanne Merriam)
• Mother Goose has a lot to answer for (Reading): *Who killed Humpty Dumpty? Who forced the old woman to swallow the fly? David Kopaska-Merkel reads from his recent book, “Nursery Rhyme Noir.” Shocking crimes lie behind the seeming innocence of nursery rhymes and children’s stories. Fortunately, Hasp Deadbolt, P.I., is on the case.
• Why everybody should be reading Science Fiction: *My father was born before the Wright Brothers flew, and he lived to see the landing on the Moon. That was when change was coming at a snail’s pace. Now we live in a technological avalanche. But people naturally resist change. Someone mentions clones, or the capability to manipulate genetics and we’re automatically opposed. It’s as if these ideas, and others, fell out of the sky. But SF people have spent the last seventy years looking at the various directions we might take, and it helps them make smart choices. Another reason to read SF: At its best, it makes dazzling entertainment. - Jack McDivett
• When Wallpapering the Den with Your Stories is Not an Option: A Q&A on Submission Etiquette: *Writing is one thing, but making it possible for millions of potential fans to read your work is quite another. David Kopaska-Merkel (speculative poet, fiction writer, and editor of Dreams & Nightmares magazine), Peg Duthie (author and editor) and Joanne Merriam (poet, fiction writer and former staffer of the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia) answer your questions about submission etiquette and standard practices in the book and magazine industries.
• It’s Time for the Bloodletting (Reading): *Joanne Merriam reads from her short post-apocalyptic story, “Sundowning,” which just appeared in Strange Horizons. Set in a future where vampires keep humans around for food, a fry cook struggles with her father’s Alzheimer’s. Merriam has had fiction in The Fiddlehead, On Spec, Southern Gothic and Stirring, and is a winner of the Strange Horizons Readers’ Award. You can find more of her work online at joannemerriam.com.
• Micro Black Holes and the LHC Scare: Dr. Ben Harms.
• Hanny’s Voorwep: The Rise of the Digital Amateur Astronomer: Dr. William Keel.
• Ask an Astronomer and Physicist: *Do you have questions about space or physics? Well come and enjoy this Q&A on astronomy and physics with University of Alabama professors! Hosted by the Astronomy and Physics departments, Dr. Dean Townsley, Dr. Dawn Williams, and Dr. William Keel will be taking questions from the audience related to astronomy and physics.
• Anthropology in Science Fiction: Exploring the Human Condition through Imagined Worlds: *We will compare portrayals in science fiction to anthropological perspectives on questions such as: What makes a human? Where does our species come from, and where are we headed? How important are the differences that separate us? Can we ever really understand each other? - Dr. Jason DeCaro.
• Sci Fi and Gaming (TP) (45 min) - ABXY
• The Science Fiction of Japanese Anime: *Have a look into the world of science fiction in Japanese anime with the people who brought you the anime convention KamiCon. See how technology in anime affects the path of modern technology, and how modern technology affects anime. Why does the most technologically advanced country in the world find anime so important? - Raymond Lenzer, KamiCon
• War of the Worlds Broadcasting Scare: Adam Schwartz
• Characters, Plot and Backstory: The Mechanics of Fiction: *All too often, the plots and backstories of science fiction and fantasy take precedence over the development of characters. Alex White gives you a series of tips and tricks designed to get you thinking about what drives a story.
• Robotics programing and demonstration: Dr. Monica Anderson and ACM
• How to get rejected: * Editors and their screeners are inundated with manuscripts from people they’ve never heard of. Hundreds of them pour in over the transom every day. So naturally they look for reasons to get rid of them, to send them back with the standard rejection letter. And to do it without having to read past the first page. Or often even the first paragraph. Here’s how we can make it easy for them to reject our submission. - Jack McDevitt

And, I will be selling copies of Edgewise. I got the covers printed yesterday, so I just need to bind them and my pre-orders will be mailed out. I’m still taking pre-orders if you’d like to get in on this hawt chapbook action.

(mirrored from joannemerriam.com)